Exclusive: Rackspace to Acquire Anso Labs
Web-hosting and cloud services provider Rackspace is acquiring Anso Labs, a San Francisco-based outfit that provides cloud consulting and services, according to sources familiar with the deal, which is small enough that financial terms are not going to be disclosed.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the second bolt-on move Rackspace has made around its core hosting business within a month: the company forged its partnership with Akamai in January 2011 to fold CDN, SSL and web-optimization features into its cloud offerings, and it now reportedly adds Anso Labs, a San Francisco cloud consulting shop. The deal is small enough that financial terms will not be disclosed, which marks it as a talent-and-capability tuck-in rather than a scale acquisition.
For Rackspace the timing matters because the company is still carrying reputational baggage from earlier years — confirmed outages at its Dallas data center in 2007 and repeated hosting failures through late 2009, including one that took down numerous major websites. Buying an on-ramp consultancy gives it a way to attach expert guidance to the cloud platform it sells.
First-order effects
- Anso Labs' consulting clients effectively gain a new parent overnight, with advisory engagements now sitting inside a company that can fulfill them with Rackspace's own hosting and cloud infrastructure.
- Rackspace acquires a dedicated cloud-services team without disclosing spend, keeping its M&A footprint light while extending beyond commodity hosting.
Second-order effects
- Competing hosting and cloud providers face pressure to match the model of bundling consulting with infrastructure, since customers evaluating cloud migrations increasingly weigh advisory support against raw capacity.
- Boutique cloud consultancies become acquisition targets for larger platforms, tightening the market for independent firms that advise enterprises on cloud adoption.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, hosting companies evolve into full-service cloud partners — selling expertise, migration help and managed operations rather than racks alone — and the line between consultant and infrastructure vendor blurs structurally.
- Consolidation of specialists into platforms concentrates enterprise cloud relationships in fewer hands, raising the stakes for buyers who want vendor-neutral advice.
The trend: Web-hosting and cloud providers are absorbing specialist consultancies to sell managed expertise alongside infrastructure, turning tuck-in acquisitions into a competitive necessity.